Slashdot Mirror
Is Microsoft's .NET Ecosystem On the Decline?
Nerval's Lobster writes: In a posting that recently attracted some buzz online, .NET developer Justin Angel (a former program manager for Silverlight) argued that the .NET ecosystem is headed for collapse—and that could take interest in C# along with it. "Sure, you'll always be able to find a job working in C# (like you would with COBOL), but you'll miss out on customer reach and risk falling behind the technology curve," he wrote. But is C# really on the decline? According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline. Data from the TIOBE developer interest index mirrors that trend, he said, with "C# developer interest down approximately 60% down back to 2006-2008 levels." Is the .NET ecosystem really headed for long-term implosion, thanks in large part to developers devoting their energies to other platforms such as iOS and Android?
Submitted by Nerval's Lobster? Check
Shilling for Dice? Check
According to Dice's data,
Did they read tea leaves or chicken bones?
Remind me again why phones and tablets needed a different programming language?
Maybe they should spend less time trying to monetize slashdot and more time getting the cruft out of their job board.
hogwash
My Slashdot layout just changed, there's no more 'read more' button. Just 'share'. You have to find the small annotation in the top right for the comments? What the hell.
Next question, please.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Fucking Slashdot is on the decline.
WTF do you think we want ot share Shashdot to Facebook and other shit for?
Fuck you guys suck at maintaining a fucking website. Stop changing everything. Stop trying to be all fucking social media. Just fucking stop.
Fuck you dice, and fuck you Nerval's Lobster -- your apparent function is to write fucking shill articles which point to fucking dice.
Many more things are becoming .NET dependent. Everything is being PowerShell-intergrated... and PowerShell is a .NET Shell, basically. Exchange was rewritten in .NET with Exchange 2013. Basically the entire Windows Server ecosystem is going that way.
Oracle is pretty much actively trying to destroy Java.
With the .NET platform now being available for cross platform development I can't see how there could be a decline in C#. It's only been about 6 months since MS offered .NET for other platforms I don't think that's enough time for any valid conclusions to be made. Wait another 6 months to a year and then take another look. I think we will see an increase in C#/.NET reflected in those numbers.
...that no one cares about posted by some jackhole dice moderator. I wish some rich Slashdot reader would buy dice to acquire Slashdot, and then fire all Dice employees, and shut dice down. FU DICE! Stop ruining Slashdot!
This seems more like an acknowledgement that ios and android are where the majority of new development jobs are right now than anything else.
Does that mean C# or .NET is on "the decline"? I suppose, strictly speaking yes. But it doesn't remotely mean its on the way to becoming like COBOL where its only used by legacy products. Windows destkop and servers are still being deployed in the millions, and .NET is an excellent platform for new development if you are targeting that market.
EOM
I work in the enterprise app space.
With the emergence of Single Page Application frameworks (I use AngularJS) a lot more of the logic of an app can be pushed to the client. The C# part of the application has morphed from being ASP.Net WebForms or (gag) MVC / Razor code into just being simple REST'ish Web API calls. It works really well.
When working with this structure you wouldn't search for a "C#" person, you would search for Web API / javascript / SQL person.
The ecosystem is alive and well. This guy is eating his sour grapes.
FUCK IT! I'll do it live and test it in production!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
.net was microsofts misguided attempt to staunch bleeding from open source competitors and recover from the increasingly drunken shit show that was ActiveX. The idea being that while most of the technology existed under Apache 2.0 license, the core redistributed package was proprietary. In typical day-late-dollar-short microsoft fashion the whole thing was hinged on a JIT compiler (because Java in 2002 was a godsend of speed and stability) and came with C++ support in 2005 (more than 20 years after the language was written...nice) via visual studio. Redmond still had a problem though, and that was without a proprietary language, the framework was pointless because C and company were all well known and reasonably portable languages that didnt net any extra cash to Microsoft. So borne of a committee C# came to be, and for many moons C# was wedged into most code shops the same way any other microsoft technology gets there: License bundles. You see programmers were writing plenty of windows software on windows machines, and compiling in windows, but discounts to licenses for the desktop OS the greybeards use was hinged upon accepting free licenses for .NET and the new C# visual studio compiler. Management, ever needful to maximize value, prevented their bosses from yelling at them and in turn started most projects down the intractable cobblestone back alley we know today as .net.
What made matters worse for everyone was now microsoft had an underhanded way to slash the tires of its competitors. If your software beat the pants off Microsoft they might buy it, but if you didnt sell and they knew you wrote C# they used the proprietary compiler against you and simply reimplemented your software with undocumented methods and subroutines that ran faster than yours. Theyd sit out your litigation until you folded, buy up your shop for cheap, and with a few modifications rebrand your application as a microsoft component.
Good people go to bed earlier.
So you are saying developers code in C# with fewer issues than those who program in Java and Javascript?
This social media S--T they keep pushing.
These DICE links and plugs that we keep getting from Nerval's Lobster?
C# isn't declining in popularity from where I sit - Slashdot is.
Why do I come here?
I sometimes wonder if programming in general is in decline. Of course, there are hot spot areas, such as phone apps at the moment. Based on my own anecdotal observations, there seems to be more demand for System Architects than Programmers. It's a "Software as a service" world now, and companies want people who can choose the correct puzzle pieces to put together into a practical system. With the advent of "cloud" services, where services are not just shared within an organization, but across the entire world, I can see how actual customized coding may become less necessary for individual companies. Companies want systems that can be built quickly, without all of the bugs and issues that can come from completely customized systems. They still want some customization, but perhaps not to the extent of a system being built from the ground-up.
Microsoft is pushing .net in directions no one thought it would five years ago in terms of being an open development platform. I think this will help boost c# popularity if anything. C# is a nice language to work with, and Visual Studio is a nice IDE to work with for the most part (it's virtual filesystem has got to go, and needs better RCS integration a la Eclipse).
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
I'd totally trust to get my information about the health of the Microsoft .NET ecosystem from an Apple fanboy.
You can tell he was a manager, because an actual developer would never think about "customer reach" when choosing a language.
We all know there are more reasons than ever to use .net for Linux development.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Stick with program managing, Justin. Actually, given you were responsible for Silverlight, find some other career entirely.
If you check Perl, Java, PHP or C++ on Indeed.com, you will see exactly the same trends.
If you perform his same terrible analysis of the TIOBE index, PHP, C++, VB.NET, Objective-C are all going to collapse. Apparently Java has been "heading for collapse" since 2004.
People who can't do statistics shouldn't report on them.
The problem does not appear to be that C# is becoming less popular (than other languages), it's appears that custom application development as a whole is becoming less popular than it was a few years ago.
This may be due to the economy, outsourcing, mobile platforms or whatever. You can't suddenly pull reasons out of your ass like this being due to "Microsoft’s ever revolving door of new technologies", despite how pissed off you are at them for shit-canning your pet project.
When doing stats on whether something is less popular, it's helpful to ask "less popular than what". Sure, it may be less popular than it used to be, but so are the competing languages. This does not indicate that the C# ecosystem is going to collapse.
Windows is still (by very far) the most used OS on desktop computers. At the corporate level this superiority becomes almost insulting and Windows is and will continue being the number 1. Thus, just by focusing on desktop corporate clients, there will be lots of very interested buyers of Windows applications during the next quite a few years (some of them still struggling with Windows XP). To not mention that the web-based languages (= ASP.NET because Silverlight well) are so different to any alternative and so similar to the desktop-based ones that quite a few companies are moving to ASP.NET; actually, there will be many more doing that if this format wouldn’t have a so restricted applicability in web-servers (but, as explained below, they seem to be working on that). In any case, I want to highlight that I personally rely much more on PHP.
.NET Framework to become increasingly more compatible with no-Windows systems within the short term.
.NET languages (C#, but even VB) have become so popular that even in the extremely unlikely scenario (better: impossible) of the claimed drastic reduction in their utilisation, some alternatives would surely appear. Additionally, a language like C# is extremely similar to quite a few other languages (like Java or even PHP) and thus learning this language will never be a bad decision.
Regarding the web and the mobile platforms, Windows & Microsoft seem to be losing the battle. On the other hand, they seem to be doing quite a few changes on this front lately (like increasing cross-compatibility or relying much more on open source); mainly because they cannot rely on their traditional monopoly-oriented attitude in any of these fronts. In fact, I do expect the
And on top of all what is written above, the
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
You're more likely to find a job using Indeed, especially if you poll the website frequently and jump on a job post when it becomes available. If you respond within 15 minutes, you're likely to get an interview. I've gotten many interviews through Indeed. DICE, meh.
My previous post is not shown but I cannot re-post it because I get an error message saying "This exact comment has already been posted. Try to be more original..."?!
.NET Framework to become increasingly more compatible with no-Windows systems within the short term.
.NET languages (C#, but even VB) have become so popular that even in the extremely unlikely scenario (better: impossible) of the claimed drastic reduction in their utilisation, some alternatives would surely appear. Additionally, a language like C# is extremely similar to quite a few other languages (like Java or even PHP) and thus learning this language will never be a bad decision.
I will try to paste it below these lines:
Windows is still (by very far) the most used OS on desktop computers. At the corporate level this superiority becomes almost insulting and Windows is and will continue being the number 1. Thus, just by focusing on desktop corporate clients, there will be lots of very interested buyers of Windows applications during the next quite a few years (some of them still struggling with Windows XP). To not mention that the web-based languages (= ASP.NET because Silverlight well) are so different to any alternative and so similar to the desktop-based ones that quite a few companies are moving to ASP.NET; actually, there will be many more doing that if this format wouldn’t have a so restricted applicability in web-servers (but, as explained below, they seem to be working on that). In any case, I want to highlight that I personally rely much more on PHP.
Regarding the web and the mobile platforms, Windows & Microsoft seem to be losing the battle. On the other hand, they seem to be doing quite a few changes on this front lately (like increasing cross-compatibility or relying much more on open source); mainly because they cannot rely on their traditional monopoly-oriented attitude in any of these fronts. In fact, I do expect the
And on top of all what is written above, the
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
Let me guess, fewer people are using /. so the bright idea is to post flaimbait stories to try and drive people back to the site?
Fail.
According to Dice's data, the popularity of C# has risen over the past several years; it ranks No. 26 on Dice's ranking of most-searched terms. But Angel claims he pulled data from Indeed.com that shows job trends for C# on the decline.
In other words,
"We cannot figure out what is going on in the IT marketplace, but we are supposed to be a resource for the IT marketplace. Please, help us analyze these trends because we cannot reconcile the differences ourselves!"
No, it is not on the decline.
If you can explain what a delegate is and use one to create an event, you can probably get hired.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Like any statistic, it must be compared to something. In this case C# is being compared with other languages that have been riding the mobile device market. With MS's mobile market share being what it is it's not surprising that C# is appearing to have weaker growth compared to say C++,Java...
At the end of the day C# is just another way to write code. If you are good at reading/writing code it doesn't matter what language it's in. My strongest language is C# because it's what I've done for the last 8 years non stop. SQL is probably my second. C++, VB, assembly, JavaScript, HTML are also languages I'm very versed with and read/write almost just as easy as C#.
Microsoft sealed the fate of .Net by not choosing it as the basis for Windows 8.x and the metro UI. That indicated that Microsoft no longer sees .Net as the next gen framework for Windows, .Net has, of course, done its job. Which was to kill Java. Which, for desktop applications, it has.
As a Windows developer, it leaves me with somewhat of a dilemma. Which framework is the way forward on the Windows platform? It's not MFC, nor Silverlight. Is it .Net? Is it Metro?
return 0; }
No.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Java dwarfs .NET, no matter what the MS shills claim. Whether or not Java is superior to C# is rather besides the point, rather how it was fairly irrelevant how superior any number of languages were to C in the 70s through the 90s (or by some definitions even now). It's simply a matter that Java was for a long time the only major cross platform application ecosystem, so the big enterprise outfits used it, and it's become rather like COBOL.
Microsoft flunkies love to get into these pissing matches with dominant technologies, and try to rejig the question so their products and technologies have the appearances of being on top (just look at how the shills try to act like Surface has any relevance at all).
If I was looking at getting back into coding (which I'm not, I've happily left that world behind), I'd sharpen up my Java skills, as I'm more likely to find sustainable employment there than with whatever Microsoft is trying to fool me into using now.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just about every .NET implementation I see has all sorts of crap in there, completely black-box.
And when it breaks, usually because the programmers assume some bog-standard "clean" environment, there's no actual "troubleshooting" recourse.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Most C# developer I've met over the years search without the C# tag like I do. I'll do something like this: ".NET copy filestream to memorystream".
Hard for silverlight to be "on the decline" - it was always crap. It was crap when it was first unveiled, it stayed crap, it's still crap. Nobody gives a crap about it, cause it's crap. When I see sites using silverlight, I know the site is gonna be crap, too, even more so than flash (which is also mostly crap).
C# in general, though, is amazingly pretty. So is the winforms API, and so is asp.net MVC (not webforms, webforms was super crap). I'm absolutely happy to have a job that's built on C# programming (didn't plan it that way, just sort of happened), and I've started using C# for little scripts and stuff I need at home, too. I don't think it's on the decline at all.
So, if job .NET postings are down on some job listing site does could that mean that there are fewer ,NET jobs here or is a lot of the work being contracted to India? Perhaps there is an overall slowdown in the market? Seems a pretty weak data to support a pretty flimsy argument.
No. Its not an the decline. It's a rock solid language and in a few cases i had to bind complex functionality on windows systems in a controlled way, and used C# and it was a very good experience. I donâ(TM)t see any reason that the language will decline soon. maybe it wont have explosive growth, but Java did neither grow from one day to the next.
There's three basic things that Microsoft is doing right these days and it applies to .NET as well as many of their other technologies / products.
1. They steadily iterate. .NET had the advantage of avoiding a lot of the bad old parts of Java because it came afterward and the designers had a good handle on what wasn't working. When something is missing or isn't working well, they address it in the next release. Microsoft has had a fairly consistent 7 major releases in 12 years. The longest gap was 2.5 years from 1.1 to 2.0 and 3.5 to 4.0. Those were also where the biggest upgrades came from. Java went 4.5 years from v6 to v7 and then almost 3 more years to v8. There's been about 9 major releases in 20 years. The pace is slower, the gaps are longer. By itself this isn't a big deal, but when it comes to evolving to meet the needs of developers, MS has the advantage.
2. Microsoft has figured out how to play in the open. .NET is well on its way to being a completely open, standardized technology. It's becoming viable to run it for real on Linux servers. The web stack is becoming very flexible and powerful. The advantages of openness that used to accrue to Apache and PHP and MySQL are now becoming strengths in .NET as well.
3. .NET has Microsoft's superior documentation and support.
I really used to dislike M$. I wrote a fair amount of Java on Linux. The MS products and operating systems are not cheap. The have been ruthless competitors and sometimes illegally so. But it's really pretty amazing to consider how well they support their stuff and how well they document it relative to the messes I've dealt with in the Java world. Oracle just doesn't appear to have as strong a team at work behind their stuff.
I still love languages like Scala and Python and I still want Linux for most of my web servers, but the gaps are closing and the game is getting really interesting. If you are ignoring Microsoft, you may get caught by surprise.
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The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
When PHBs think of development, they think of one of two things: either an MS Access database with code-behind in VBA, or they think of Visual Studio. Naturally, nearly all of the most useful features of Visual Studio hook into at least some kind of .NET language or runtime.
As long as PHBs continue to consider Microsoft stuff as the "name brand" for software development, like Kleenex for tissues, we won't see .NET going anywhere. After all, if they're willing to bankroll $1M in license fees for a couple hundred devs to buy VS Ultimate...
Having played both sides of the fence, Java vs C# for server-side stuff is about equal. Especially if you use a good framework, inversion of control, and unit/integration testing. At this point, you can succeed with either.
The main downside right now with C# is your limitation to running on top of Microsoft Windows/Azure servers stack. Support for running against non-Microsoft technologies (such as PostgreSQL, or under a different O/S) is still a rough edge.
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Don't pull shit out of your ass
Please choose your images more carefully, some things cannot be easily unthought.
C# and .NET were Microsoft's answer to Borland's Delphi (which was their answer to VB) and Java. They poached Anders from Borland after he created Delphi and they didn't want another ass kicking. I have always wondered if he had the idea for .NET before going to the dark side and that Borland, when they went off their their idiotic Java vision quest and became Inprise, blew him off and Microsoft realized the potential of his vision. He has had free reign pretty much ever since.
I don't dislike the .NET platform. Still, I find it ironic that Microsoft Skype is abandoning the Modern interface and rolling back to the older Win32 version (ironically, written in Delphi).
And, I find it interesting that Delphi has been rising on the Triobe index (currently, at #10...just behind JavaScript) after everyone predicted its certain demise. C# is in the 4th place and rising.
I would hardly call Silverlight crap (on the technology front anyway), especially when compared to Flash. If the goal was to give Microsoft desktop developers (.NET/C#/WPF XAML) a way to make very rich browser based apps, then it succeeded. Don't forget that many more vertical market apps are built and used within a company, rather than the public facing internet. I don't think I've ever seen a public facing use of Silverlight besides Netflix (and they have now moved away from it only very recently because finally HTML5 has caught up on the media side). I'm sure Microsoft was hoping Silverlight would be adopted as widely as Flash but right when Silverlight finally became decent (v3+) was when iOS took off and all plugin based web add-ons started to tank.
Huh? Winform has been deprecated by WPF and XAML-based UI for 10 years. Winform is essentially the same old crap that comes out from OS/2 before made into Windows API, just an object-oriented wrapper of stone-aged tech. You have no idea what you missed.
It is even worse than Motif and TK, which at least have proper automatic layout system.
It takes longer to run the .net updates than it takes for the whole rest of a reinstall.
What crap!
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
With MS now opensourcing their .NET framework, and more and more crossplatform development enviroments using it, I don't see it happening that it will really go into decline.. Let's not forget C# is a language which is not specifically coupled with .NET..
But what would be the next 'hip' language to do your work in?
Because the world can never have enough calculator utilities. But mostly because .Net is the perfect zombie code.
.Net, from day one, was a vehicle for clueless middle-managers to justify sitting around blabbering web-economy bullshit and spending ginormous amounts of money for their consulting buddys to scoop up because they have a few devs at hand that are willing to play along and develop under-performing, non-future-safe, overpriced superfluos crappy MS-lockin middleware and shoddy MS SharePain intranets.
I said it when .Net came out, and it holds true to this very day: With Java and other toolsets being FOSS, there was no point whatsoever for .Net - a Type A MS plattform login, no matter how MS marketing bullshit tries to spin it.
*Everyone* with more than 2 braincells saw this and still sees this. If they'd've FOSSed .Net 10 years ago, like I and many others, even right here on slashdot said they should do, they might have had a chance. This way .Net, like all proprietary closed source software, is a dead end, and everyone with a brain stears clear or just does it for the quick cash and doesn't expect it to be around in the long run.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I wish some rich Slashdot reader would buy dice to acquire Slashdot
And financially reward Dice for their crimes....? Hell no. Unacceptable. I will not be satisfied until all Dice executives and employees, down to the janitor and secretary, are living under a bridge and dumpster diving for their next meal.
Someone just needs to make a new website, and let this turd circle the drain.
How hard could it really be to duplicate and/or improve upon the site design, let alone the self-described editorial staff? Use the classic low bandwidth style, HTML/CSS only with only a tiny smattering of Javascript as UI sugar, and get rid of all the Web 2.0 garbage. Maybe even put in some God damned Unicode support, and rethink the karma system so good comments don't get buried under bad moderation. Design the site right and seed it with interesting (and timely) stories, and it will take off, while this place turns into a graveyard in short order.
Fuck Dice with a sword for ruining what was once a great web site.
Why--just fucking why--does the entire Western world have to be overrun by such imbeciles?
God help us all.
the user formerly known as shiftless (410350)
Every large company in my city (Cincinnati) uises .NET heavily. Some of them are using VB, but they are almost exclusively using .NET. The amount of money and inertia to change that is so high that I don't see how OP's assertion could be correct. Big companies like Microsoft. And that's okay.
Hmmm...very interesting, both on the rise of Delphi and that Skype is going back to their Win32 interface (written in Delphi).
I have to say that, when Skype went to whatever the hell they're using now, it became like almost everything else Microsoft makes; bloated and sluggish. It takes my Skype client 2 minutes to start up. I'm guessing they got complaints and saw a decline in usage. I'm glad they're going back to a client base that seemed to work reasonably well.
An interesting note (perhaps?), Skype originated in Australia. I worked for a company that also had origins in Australia, and an internal tool they wrote was written in Delphi. I wonder if this is a general trend in Australia. Because in all other Windows desktop app developers I've worked for (Silicon Valley) had always used Microsoft Visual C++/Visual Studio/MFC (I might be dating myself here). One company had a Java applet, but it was to be used in conjunction with a back-end that was written in Visual C++.
I think the problem is that you can make a higher quality product using Qt, but it IS more expensive. Writing C# code, or Java line-of-business stuff is just more cost-effective when the use cases are very specific. I mean I wouldn't write some one-off program to manage some tiddly business process somewhere in C++/Qt because nobody cares if it has to run on a Windows box, and nobody cares if it is fast, small, or even all that reliable. So a vast array of stuff exists in these environments.
Then there's super high-reliability stuff, like most of the code I write. It has to handle 400 million transactions in a week and never crash, never miss one, etc. It certainly COULD be written in C++, but the hunt for stupid programming errors you can't make in Java just makes it more costly. Its also easier to train a Java/C# guy to a level where he can do decent work.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson